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Mike Cuevas

US Agency
Owner

Case Study

Mike Cuevas, founder of Sweet Assist

Client Overview

Mike Cuevas runs Sweet Assist out of San Diego. He sells video to realtors, lawyers, a CPA and a veterinary ER, and he had been making all of it the hard way for years.

To keep up he hired. Five people, then ten, all on payroll. The work came in and the profit walked out with it. His words, not ours: he used to pay all those people a lot of money.

10 peopleon his payroll before us
23 clientswaiting on video every month
Payroll ate the profitHe had the clients and he had the demand. Keeping up meant carrying a full production team, and that was the part that never added up.

What We Did

We became his production team. Not one freelancer he had to brief every week, but a bench with a named editor sitting on each of his clients.

Same editor, same client, every time. So when one of his clients asks for something particular, they ask once and it stays asked.

1,258 assets1,019 finished videos and 239 thumbnails
Every 14 hoursone more finished video, at that pace, for 598 days straight
23 clients under his brandServed in his name, on his board, to his standard. He never told them who we were.

Our Strategy

His clients are conservative and his margin is thin, so the work had to be predictable before it was clever.

Most of what we built exists to stop the same conversation happening twice. The rest is coordination, which is the part that used to eat his week.

  • Every client gets a named editor who stays on that account, so a note given once never has to be given again.
  • Each client has its own template. Presets, end screens and captions are locked before anyone starts cutting.
  • The long form gets approved first. Shorts come out of the approved cut, so revisions stop multiplying.
  • Notion automations move each video between stages and flag what is waiting, so nobody has to chase status.
  • Shorts stay under 90 seconds, because that is what his clients’ channels actually run.

The Results

He kept every client and stopped paying a payroll to keep them. Then he did the thing the payroll had been blocking, which was take on more work.

Twenty months in, we have not missed one.

The 10 person team, goneHe kept the client list and the output. What he stopped carrying was the salaries underneath it.
20 monthsevery one of them delivered, with no gap
Room to growhe added clients instead of staff

In his own words

“Dopameme not only has better quality videos, but they allow us to run our business and continue to give our clients a good product, as well as allow us to have margins that make sense.”

“These guys pretty much nail it out every single time.”Mike Cuevas · Sweet Assist, San Diego

Mike did not need better videos. He needed to stop paying ten people to make them. Once production sat with us, the client list stayed his, the margin came back, and the ceiling he kept hitting stopped being a staffing problem.

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